May 16, 2010

Africa’s lake Tanganyika warming fast, life dying

It’s good to see when the media gets it right. The Reuters covers the impact of rising global temperatures on a lake in Africa that 10 million people depend on. Notable excerpts below.

“Africa’s lake Tanganyika has heated up sharply over the past 90 years and is now warmer than at any time for at least 1,500 years, a scientific paper said on Sunday, adding that fish and wildlife are threatened.

The lake, which straddles the border between Tanzania in East Africaand the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is the world’s second largest by volume and its second deepest, the paper says.”

“Geologists at Rhode Island’s Brown University used carbon dating to measure the age of sediments on the lake floor. They then tested fossilized micro-organisms whose membranes differ at various temperatures to gauge how hot it was at times past.

The results were published in Nature Geoscience on Sunday.

“Lake Tanganyika has experienced unprecedented warming in the last century,” a press release accompanying the paper said. “The warming likely is affecting valuable fish stocks upon which millions of people depend.”